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November 4, 2014

Your hair is something that you may begin to take for granted, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. We know the basics of our hair like how to avoid damage and when to get a trim, but what about the deeper details of our hair? Take a look at these ten little known facts about hair, and how they are important to you.

The Facts

These little known facts may make you think twice about your hair and the care it needs:

Have you ever gotten out of the shower, combed your hair and felt it’s grown longer overnight? That’s because when healthy hair is wet, one strand can be stretched to about 30% its original length. Just be cautious, remember that wet hair breaks more easily. It is best to wait until it has dried a bit before combing it out.

All mammals will at some point in their life have hair, even if it is only temporary. Even newborn whales will be covered in fuzz for a period of time.

Hair is very absorbent and works to absorb oil from water, similar to a sponge. There are even eco-friendly volunteer groups that use human hair as their tool for cleaning up oil spills in certain situations.

Black hair is the most common color of hair while red is the rarest. It is estimated that only one percent of the world population has naturally red hair. Natural blondes are not far behind with only two percent of people in the world with this hair color.

There is only one tissue in the body that grows faster than the hair and that’s bone marrow. While there is some variation, there are certain stimulations that will help the hair grow slightly faster, but not faster than the growth of bone marrow.

The process of dying and highlighting hair has greatly evolved over the years, and aren’t you glad it has? In Ancient Rome women who wanted a lighter hair color would use pigeon dung to get the desired color. Women in Renaissance Venice used horse urine to change their hair color.

While hair can be used in forensics to determine many different things including the elements present in your bloodstream, the only thing it cannot be used to identify is your gender. Men and women’s hair carry no differences, but other DNA structures can be determined here.

Hair is one of the strongest substances. A single strand of hair can hold up to 100 grams of weight. If the 100,000 hairs on your head were to work together, they could support the weight of two elephants, that’s about 13 tons!

You don’t start to show that you’ve begun balding until you’ve already lost over 50% of the hair from your scalp.

Excluding the soles of the feet, palms of the hands, lips, eyelids, and mucous membranes, hair can grow anywhere on your body.